I’ve been following the rapprochement between Israel and its Sunni Arab neighbors for some time now. Today, Joshua Block offers further evidence that it is real.
They do not need commentary, but these events deserve being noted:
The list goes on. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman told the Atlantic in March: “I believe the Palestinians and the Israelis have the right to have their own land.” At the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in September, Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi had an amicable meeting with Mr. Netanyahu. Israel and Egypt have had diplomatic relations since 1979, but it has often been characterized as a “cold peace.” Mr. Netanyahu, in his address to the General Assembly, said that Israel and the Arab world are “closer together than ever before, in an intimacy and friendship that I’ve not seen in my lifetime and would have been unimaginable a few years ago.”
Weeks later, the Emirati ambassador to Washington, Yousef al-Otaiba, shared a table with his Israeli counterpart, Ron Dermer, at a public pro-Israel event. And following Mr. Netanyahu’s visit to Oman, it emerged that Transport Minister Yisrael Katz had been invited by the sultanate to participate in the upcoming World Congress of the International Road Transport Union to discuss plans for a railway linking Israel to the Persian Gulf.
The reasons for the new alliances are twofold. First, the threat of Iran. But also, what Israel can contribute to a region that wants to modernize rapidly.
The growing alliance between Israel and the Sunni Arab world is driven in part by economics. Israel’s entrepreneurship benefits all nations in the region. But an even more pressing concern is the common threat from Iran. Tehran’s hegemonic ambitions are being felt from the battlefields of Syria to the Gulf of Aden. In May, Bahrain went so far as to back Israel’s right to defend itself against Iranian aggression.
“We are not saying that the road is now easy and paved with flowers,” Oman’s foreign minister said last week. But the rapprochement between Israel and the Arab world will change the region for the better.
As I noted many months ago, the war between Israel and the Palestinians is over. The Palestinians lost.
The Palis have known they lost since 1949, but have been propped up by other Arab nations, which appear to be realizing at long last that that's not good for them, and worse for the Palis. Mindsets are often a good thing to break, but it's a struggle and it hurts.
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ReplyDeleteAnon has obviously been drinking purple Pabst.
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ReplyDeleteAnon: That boy is MESSEd UP!
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ReplyDeleteWhen one traffics in Formal Fallacies they should be given a chance to rectify it, but it does seem that we have someone who fails, or maybe not, to take into consideration other commenters. At some point it becomes time to remove what amounts to drivel not meant to have any cogent argumentation. Twatwaffle is as close as one comes to an explanation.
ReplyDeleteNOTE: That I have already written off their meanderings.